When Bruce Dern, 76, stood up and received a 10-minute ovation at Cannes after the premiere of his film Nebraska he took the opportunity to praise his director. The screen veteran, who surely has the most unnerving glassy blue stare in cinema history, hailed Alexander Payne as one of the greats.

"I can say I've worked for six geniuses: [Elia] Kazan, Hitchcock, Douglas Trumbull – a lot of people ask about that one, but trust me, he's a genius – Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, and of course, Alexander Payne," Dern said, looking back on 50 years of acting.

His words resonated around Cannes because this weekend the festival has celebrated the talents of Hollywood's mavericks: those influential film-makers who survive in spite of their struggle with the populist demands of the industry. So, to Dern's roll call of brave maestros, we can add three names he has yet to work with: Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch and Roman Polanski. Like Payne, they are contemporary film-makers with cult followings who have walked the rocky path between pleasing their producers and making films that illuminate the dark underbelly of life. And all of them premiered work in Cannes in the last four days. Beyond the glitter and hype of the red carpet, these rebellious souls have demonstrated a love-hate relationship with showbusiness that has shaped their careers.

Payne, Dern implied, is in a tradition of subversives who have courted Hollywood money yet recoiled from the superficiality and predictability of the films that most producers want to finance. The director, 52, from Nebraska, made his 2011 hit The Descendants, starring George Clooney, following the critical success of the bleak comedies Sideways and Election.

As the star of his latest film, Dern plays a demented father obsessed with redeeming the promise of fictitious lottery winnings received in a junk mailing. Not a very glamorous role, but then the actor, and father of actress Laura Dern, made his name in the 1970s playing odd characters on the edge of mainstream life in films such as Trumbull's Silent Running or Hal Ashby's Coming Home. As a result, he has worked with a succession of Hollywood's less crowd-pleasing film-makers and appreciates their courage. "I never had much of a relationship with my own father, but at the end of this movie I found my father – and that's him," an emotional Dern said on Thursday, pointing at Payne. "I got that trust to dare to fail."

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While Payne has talked publicly of the difficulty of finding stories that he can make into feature films, the director with a clearly troubled relationship with conventional American cinema is Soderbergh. In Cannes to premiere Behind the Candelabra, Soderbergh announced in January that he is leaving film-making for good. He has now also revealed that he is selling all his film memorabilia. Ephemera and publicity material from his earlier work, Erin Brockovich, Solaris and Traffic, will be auctioned for charity as a way of marking his decision to quit. "I didn't want to throw this stuff away but I didn't want to keep it either, so I figured the smart play was to put it up for auction and donate the money to charity," the director from Atlanta said last week.

His acclaimed final film, which stars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon as the entertainer Liberace and his boyfriend Scott Thorson, has been received with rapture by critics in Cannes and is thought to be in strong contention for the Palme d'Or prize awarded on Sunday. It would be a suitable end to a career that has swung from the extremes of his fashionable first hit, Sex, Lies and Videotape, and the commercial success of his starry heist movies, Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen. When Soderbergh threw in the towel early this year he said: "The worst development in film-making – particularly in the last five years – is how badly directors are treated. It has become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen, to put it bluntly. It's not just studios – it's who is financing a film. I guess I don't understand the assumption that the director is presumptively wrong about what the audience wants or needs when they are the first audience, in a way. And probably got into making movies because of being in that audience."

His farewell to Hollywood has been in progress for three years now and the thriller Side Effects may prove to have been his last theatrical release. Behind the Candelabra will be screened first on the pay-TV network HBO in America, which means it will not be eligible for an Oscar. And here lies the clue to his plans. Soderbergh is reported to be teaming up with British actor Clive Owen to make a costume drama series for TV called The Knick, about the staff of New York City's Knickerbocker hospital at the turn of the century.

Television, and especially long-form drama, appeals as never before to those directors who want to address serious subjects. In Cannes last week another veteran American actor from the 1970s, James Caan, 73, expressed this same disillusionment with the big screen. Known best for his role as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, Caan was on the Croisette to promote Guillaume Canet's Blood Ties, about a divided family in Brooklyn. "I've become very negative about the films of today," said Caan. "I was very fortunate in the 70s to work with the best actors, the best directors, the best cinematographers. And [the films] had a beginning, a middle and an end, which was something very odd." Nowadays, he complained, "it seems like most of the films they're doing, in Hollywood anyway, are these franchise films."

At a safe distance from any lucrative franchise offers is the director Jim Jarmusch, in Cannes this weekend for the premiere of his independently financed vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive. His film stars British talents Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as ancient, blood-sucking lovers, and has a heavy gothic look. Like Soderbergh, Jarmusch found financing his film was a challenge until British producer Jeremy Thomas stepped in. Jarmusch, who was born in Ohio and is 60, made his name in 1984 with the enigmatic Stranger than Paradise and went on to make Down by Law. He last competed in Cannes with Broken Flowers in 2005 and has a famously uncommercial outlook. "I'd rather make a movie about a guy walking his dog than about the emperor of China," he once said.

Jarmusch describes his film as an unconventional love story between characters named Adam and Eve. "My script was partially inspired by the last book published by Mark Twain: The Diaries of Adam and Eve," he has said. "These two lovers are archetypal outsiders, classic bohemians, extremely intelligent and sophisticated – yet still in full possession of their animal instincts. They have travelled the world and experienced many remarkable things, always inhabiting the shadowed margins of society."

However, the director with probably the most complicated relationship with Hollywood is Polanski, whose film Venus in Fur, screened on Saturday. Lionised for the brilliance of his early films Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and, more recently, for the Palme d'Or winning The Pianist, French-born Polanski, 79, is a genuine outcast. After the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of Charles Manson's gang, he left California for ever, fleeing a charge of sexual assault on a 13-year-old girl which has haunted him for the rest of his life. His latest film stars his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, alongside Mathieu Amalric, and was filmed in French, making it his first non-English language film in 40 years. It is as clear a statement of artistic loyalty as Polanski could make.

Hollywood has always had an uneasy relationship with directors who want to take risks and tell downbeat stories. Film-making is expensive and producers know that these films – even the great ones, that keep on being watched – never make much money. They should also know, though, that directors with a truly maverick spirit are the lifeblood of the industry.